4.3 The Law-Giver Of Nature
The final condition of self-consciousness that Kant adds to the preceding conditions is that our understanding must cooperate with sensibility to construct one, unbounded, and unified space-time to which all of our representations may be related.
To see why this further condition is required, consider that so far we have seen why Kant holds that we must represent an objective world in order to be self-conscious, but we could represent an objective world even if it were not possible to relate all of our representations to this objective world.
For all that has been said so far, we might still have unruly representations that we cannot relate in any way to the objective framework of our experience.
On Kant’s view, this would be a problem because, as we have seen, he holds that self-consciousness involves universality and necessity: according to his principle of apperception, “the I think must be able to accompany all my representations” (B131).
Yet if, on the one hand, I had representations that I could not relate in some way to an objective world, then I could not accompany those representations with “I think” or recognize them as my representations, because I can say “I think…” about any given representation only by relating it to an objective world, according to the argument just discussed.
So I must be able to relate any given representation to an objective world in order for it to count as mine.
On the other hand, self-consciousness would also be impossible if I represented multiple objective worlds, even if I could relate all of my representations to some objective world or other.
In that case, I could not become conscious of an identical self that has, say, representation 1 in space-time A and representation 2 in space-time B.
It may be possible to imagine disjointed spaces and times, but it is not possible to represent them as objectively real.
So self-consciousness requires that I can relate all of my representations to a single objective world.
The reason why I must represent this one objective world by means of a unified and unbounded space-time is that, as Kant argued in the Transcendental Aesthetic, space and time are the pure forms of human intuition.
If we had different forms of intuition, then our experience would still have to constitute a unified whole in order for us to be self-conscious, but this would not be a spatio-temporal whole.
Given that space and time are our forms of intuition, however, our understanding must still cooperate with sensibility to construct a spatio-temporal whole of experience because, once again, “we can represent nothing as combined in the object without having previously combined it ourselves,” and “all combination […] is an action of the understanding” (B130).
So Kant distinguishes between space and time as pure forms of intuition, which belong solely to sensibility; and the formal intuitions of space and time (or space-time), which are unified by the understanding (B160–161).
These formal intuitions are the spatio-temporal whole within which our understanding constructs experience in accordance with the categories.[18]
The most important implication of Kant’s claim that the understanding constructs a single whole of experience to which all of our representations can be related is that, since he defines nature “regarded materially” as “the sum total of all appearances” and he has argued that the categories are objectively valid of all possible appearances, on his view it follows that our categories are the source of the fundamental laws of nature “regarded formally” (B163, 165).
So Kant concludes on this basis that
the Understanding is
the true law-giver of nature.
In his words:
- “all appearances in nature, as far as their combination is concerned, stand under the categories, on which nature (considered merely as nature in general) depends, as the original ground of its necessary lawfulness (as nature regarded formally)” (B165).
Or more strongly:
- “we ourselves bring into the appearances that order and regularity that we call nature, and moreover we would not be able to find it there if we, or the nature of our mind, had not originally put it there.
[…] The understanding is thus not merely a faculty for making rules through the comparison of the appearances: it is itself the legislation for nature, i.e., without understanding there would not be any nature at all” (A125–126).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/#LawGivNat